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Cameron needs to shock his party. Afghanistan will do it

Next week David Cameron completes six months as Tory leader. He has already given us the launch, the schmooze, the image shift and the nutty bit on ice. He has taken to the new politics with aplomb. Above all, he and his team have shown that they can learn. They have read Tony Blair as attentively as Blair read Margaret Thatcher. The leadership bloodline holds strong. What now?

The most irrelevant criticism of the Cameron campaign is that it lacks “substance” and is fixated with personality. That is what it should be. Throwbacks to the old politics have been the curse of Conservative strategists for a decade. They amount to a complaint that Cameron wants to be prime minister.

If there is a Machiavellian moral that Blair taught his party in the mid-1990s it was that policies are mere vapours without power. Lose sight of this, as Labour did in